Why pay $1m when you can pay PwC $30m, and help yourself to free IP?
Allegations have emerged that senior officials from the Departments of Veterans Affairs (DVA) and Defence appropriated the intellectual property of a suicide prevention app from a veteran-owned business. Stuart McCarthy with the investigation.
Consulting firm Deloitte was reportedly paid more than $1M by Defence to develop the mental health phone app HeadStrength, partially based on intellectual property (IP) from another company, RedSix.
TPB chair offers Senate little joy on ongoing PwC probes
The Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) has told Senate estimates it expects to conclude two of the nine outstanding investigations into the PwC confidentiality breach by the end of this year.
TPB chair Peter de Cure told Senator Richard Colbeck during a spillover hearing of estimates that two larger cases are expected to be completed this year.
This means there will be seven more disciplinary matters that the board will be working through into 2025 — dragging PwC Australia into yet another year of focus on the tax leaks scandal from which the firm and its chief executive officer, Kevin Burrowes, want to move on.…
‘We will look dimly on inappropriate dob-ins’: TPB chairman
Australian advisers should tread carefully when using new reporting obligations to complain about peers, Tax Practitioners’ Board chairman Peter de Cure tells ITR in an exclusive interview …
‘Deeply offensive’:
ATO boss slams
-debt comparison
“We have made mistakes and some of
that communication was unclear to people,” he said.
The ATO has paused the push for
repayments and promised to review its methods for unpaid liabilities.
Parliament will consider laws to allow some taxpayers with debts from before
2017 to have their annual refunds processed as normal.
About 7000 taxpayers have already
paid back about $1 million, including nearly 4000 who have cleared their total
debt.
Taxpayers are required to keep tax
records for five years and make them available in the case of audit or
reassessment of annual returns. But some of the debts pre-dated the review
period.
The debts in question are
categorised as “on hold” because the ATO was not taking active steps to recover
the amounts. Taxpayers were informed in writing about the amount, and that
while the ATO will not currently pursue the debt, it remains payable.
The ATO has no power to forgive or
waive a tax debt. Outstanding amounts are routinely settled when taxpayers
lodge an annual return.
In March, the independent tax
ombudsman slammed the ATO for its handling of the small debts, warning that
government agencies must be transparent in chasing unpaid money and not cause
unnecessary distress.
The Inspector-General of Taxation
and Commonwealth Ombudsman issued a new set of best-practice guidelines on how
government agencies should tell individuals they owe money, using the small debt failure as an example of what not to do.
Greens senator Nick McKim said
taxpayers who had repaid their debts based on the original letters should
receive refunds.
“You’re going to provide discretion
to the ATO not to pursue some of these debts, but you’re not going to provide
discretion to the ATO to refund the debts that were paid by people who received
a confusing communication for which the ATO has apologised,” he said.
“You’re effectively penalising
people who were intimidated by a confusing piece of communication into paying a
debt.”
The debts in question are small beer
for the ATO.
Its recent annual report showed the
total debt book for individuals and businesses had increased by 89 per cent in
the four years to 2023, reaching $50.2 billion at June 30.
RELATED
ATO has ‘stuffed’ robo-tax debt recovery effort: ombudsman
